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West Already Weaponizing Fake News
November 23, 2016 | 6:51 pm

19:56 23.11.2016(updated 20:02 23.11.2016)
Finian Cunningham

You really know that masses of people are living within a mind-control matrix when the greatest, most pervasive purveyors of fake news denounce others for the practice. And yet they do so without the slightest hint of awareness about their own monstrous hypocrisy. “Fake news” has become a hot issue following the surprise US election victory of maverick business tycoon Donald Trump. Supposedly serious Western media outlets have highlighted the spread of hoax stories purporting to be news reports as having swayed the presidential race in Trump’s favor against his rival, Democrat career politician Hillary Clinton. One such hoax “report” was that Pope Francis had allegedly given his blessing to Trump just before the November 8 poll, which presumably prompted some American Catholics on board the Republican’s election ticket. No doubt, the internet is a plentiful source of false rumor and other bizarre, tall stories. But now, it seems, Western corporate media giants are calling for Facebook and other social networking sites to weed out “fake news”. Given how wrong the US media called the election and also their rabid bias against Trump, the hunt for a scapegoat is understandable. US media mogul Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, seems ready to comply with demands to provide a team of censors against the spread of fictive reports. Even though, he claims that the vast majority of news links on his worldwide network are to genuine, factual content. This is setting a sinister precedent for abusive, systematic censorship. Unfortunately, control of global information is prone to subjective Western cultural and political bias. Already we see how it is Western media outlets who are making an issue over “fake news” and it is Western-based internet companies like Facebook and Google who are taking on the mantle of filtering out content. It is not hard, therefore, to imagine how this train of thought could be applied eventually to non-Western news services that supply information critical of Western government interests an conduct. Take, for example, the war in Syria. Russian news media have provided many important, documented reports and analyses on how Washington and its Western allies are systematically colluding with jihadi terror groups to prosecute a covert, criminal war for regime change against the elected government of Syria. By contrast, the Western corporate media have rarely if ever given any coverage to such verifiable violations by their governments in Syria. Or in any other recent conflict for that matter, such as in Yemen, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Georgia. Of course, this is because Western media outlets are part of the ideological, propaganda matrix that serves to conceal the crimes of Western governments, which, in turn, serve to facilitate the strategic interests of Western corporations. Western so-called news services do on occasion publish outright fake news, such as when Iraq was accused of possessing weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the US-led war in 2003. But far more often, the informational fare is less crudely fabricated and more subtly finessed with distortions and omissions of crucial facts and context. Still, that is tantamount to fake news, no less. This week, Western newspapers and TV channels were reporting on how Russia was “destabilizing European security” by installing Iskander missiles and the S-400 defense system in its territory of Kaliningrad – the exclave between Lithuania and Poland. The supposedly august London Times headlined its report thus: “Putin moves his missiles in new threat to Europe”. The foreboding tone is typical of the constant flow of Western media reports over many months alleging that Russian warships and warplanes are menacing European territories. From Britain’s Daily Mail to America’s New York Times we have been told since at least last year that Russian troops were about to invade the Baltic states. No matter that Moscow, including President Vladimir Putin and his top diplomat Sergei Lavrov, has repeatedly dismissed the allegations of Russian aggression. Undeterred, the Western “news stories” just keep being churned out as if by a manic conveyor belt. As always, this week’s Western Russian-scare episode was spun and disseminated without the appropriate, crucial context. The installation of missiles on Russia’s western-most territory comes after the US-led NATO military alliance announced plans last month to greatly escalate troops on Russia’s border. The Kaliningrad move also follows the deployment of US missile systems in Romania earlier this year. Evidently, Russia’s latest military measures are in response to US and NATO offensive steps, or as Putin told American film director Oliver Stone in an interview aired this week, the Russian moves are “counter-measures”. Washington and its NATO allies justify their reckless escalation on Russia’s borders as “defensive response” to alleged Russian intervention in Ukraine in 2014 and Georgia in 2008. But such Western claims are easily disputable, indeed rendered baseless if given to objective scrutiny. The trouble is, however, Western media have by and large not allowed factual reportage to intrude on their pre-ordained narrative of impugning and demonizing Russia. What we see is a systematic information campaign – bluntly, propaganda – that propagates fake news upon fake news in order to justify Western strategic interests. Those interests include: propping up NATO and the Western military-industrial complex that is so vital to sustain late capitalist economies; as well as subjugating Russia and its enormous natural resources for exploitation by Western corporations. In this perspective, fake news about the Pope backing Donald Trump or about Hillary Clinton’s health condition is a trifle. The real perpetrators of fake news are professional media conglomerates that pound TV channels and internet screens every second of every day, with the diabolical risk of igniting all-out global war. This corporate-controlled fake news about alleged Russian aggression in Europe or purported violations in Syria and Ukraine is correlated with the sanitizing of real news about how Western governments are supporting terrorists in Syria, or aiding and abetting state-sponsored slaughter of civilians in Yemen. So pervasive is this matrix that the systematic purveyors of fake news can turn around and, with a straight face, pontificate to others about the “ethics of journalism”. What is truly alarming is that the West’s weaponization of information – self-declared as independent, free-thinking – has become so inculcated that real, alternative news could end up being banished from public access. Dissenting news sites, including many that are based in the West and elsewhere, including Russia’s RT and Sputnik, often convey context and facts that upend Western official narratives. Just because those alternative news perspectives might appear outlandish to grossly distorted Western narratives, will they then be subject to censorship? Accusing Western governments of sponsoring terrorism or fabricating “Russian aggression” could, plausibly, seem like fake news if control of the internet were given over to a coterie of Western-based monitors. But such designation of “fake news” is only due to oblivious cultural arrogance and indoctrination. Maybe the internet will not succumb to the latest Western crusade against “fake news”. However, considering how so much of Western “news” is already weaponized and when you consider the deeper malign purposes that it truly serves, then the practice of creeping censorship is never too far away. The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Sputnik.

http://houstoncommunistparty.com/west-already-weaponizing-fake-news/

This will be a tool for the bosses to manage content. We'll have to write like Chernyshevsky. (with all that implies...) Nonetheless, they must sell rope.

I just wish we had a Chernyshevsky among us. And they already sold a shit-raft of rope...

Various Flavors of Fake News about Venezuela
By: Joe Emersberger

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The wife of right-wing opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez, Lilian Tintori speaks to the press. | Photo: EFE

Published 24 November 2016 (3 hours 49 minutes ago)

Impossible to escape bombardment by the U.S government’s perspective on Venezuela.
An article by William Finnegan published November 14 in the New Yorker (Venezuela: A Failing State) is similar to an error-riddled piece that Jon Lee Anderson wrote in 2013. It is padded with extraneous and anecdotal details that will give unwary readers the impression that the author has diligently researched. The article begins by marveling at the courage of a medical student who called President Maduro an “asshole” and “donkey” and who didn’t mind his name being used — as if Maduro were not attacked and ridiculed constantly in Venezuela’s TV and print media.

In a few other instances, Finnegan also insinuates that criticizing the government takes great courage and that very few people dare to do it publicly. He described the far right newspaper El Nacional as “one of the last independent national dailies still standing” after “years of government assault on the press.”

The day before Finnegan’s article was published, Venezuela’s largest circulating newspaper, Ultimas Noticias, ran an op-ed by Gloria Cuenca, a regular contributor, that asked “is this government trying to imitate North Korea?” That same day, another op-ed in Ultimas Noticias, by opposition legislator Julio Borges, stated that “it is unjustifiable and even cruel that Nicolas Maduro has ordered imports of toys and Christmas products instead of concerning himself with bringing food and medicine to alleviate the grave crisis in Venezuela.” A few days later, another regular contributor, Pompeyo Marquez, outlined the key goals he shares with main opposition group: “a change in president, in the regime, in the economic model, freedom for political prisoners, an end to repression.”



Harsh government critics are also extremely easy to find Venezuela’s largest TV networks. When interviewed, they are not badgered and scolded the way Black Lives Matter activists are in the United States when they appear on TV at all.

In this lengthy on Venevision on November 20, opposition legislator Maria Beatriz Martinez says that a "large percentage of our population is looking through garbage for something to eat" and accuses the government of blocking elections because it knows the opposition would win.

During this November 6 interview on Globovision (which the international media would have you believe has been government controlled since 2015), Maria Corina Machado says that the government is a "dictatorship" and accuses it of rejecting humanitarian aid because it does not care if infants die in hospitals. Machado has been all over the Venezuelan media for years calling the government a “dictatorship”.

In a recent lengthy interview on Venevision, Julio Borges accuses the government of "stealing the right to vote," of keeping "political prisoners." He calls the government "de-legitimized," "without authority" and discusses a political trial his allies in the National Assembly launched against President Maduro. Not only is Borges frequently interviewed on Venezuelan TV, his op-eds also appear regularly in Venezuela’s second-largest newspaper, El Universal, another outlet that international journalists have dishonestly, or perhaps ignorantly, dismissed as a “government mouthpiece.”

The combined audience share for news of the largest private TV broadcasters (Venevision, Televen, Globovision) is much larger than that of the government-run networks. As of 2013, their combined audience share for news was 72 percent according to data compiled by the Carter Center which is tightly linked to the U.S. establishment.

Finnegan’s New Yorker article passes quickly over the 2002 coup that briefly deposed Venezuela’s democratically elected President (Hugo Chavez). Finnegan wrote, “After Chavez barely survived a 2002 coup attempt, the Cubans also sent teams of military and intelligence advisers who taught their Venezuelan counterparts how to surveil and disrupt the political opposition Cuban-style, with close monitoring, harassment, and strategic arrests.”

It was not a coup “attempt.” The coup succeeded for two days. Pedro Carmona, head of country’s largest business federation, installed himself as dictator. He annulled the constitution, fired the Supreme Court and dismissed elected officials.

Finnegan’s friends at El Nacional welcomed the Carmona dictatorship as did Venezuela’s entire private media. While Carmona was in power, the private media was praised for its contribution to the coup. The leaders of Venezuela’s opposition remains heavily populated by people who supported (and in Leopoldo Lopez’s case, participated in) the coup. Jesus “Chua” Torrealba, the relatively moderate head of MUD, the main opposition coalition, signed an open letter that welcomed Carmona’s dictatorship.

It was published by El Nacional. U.S. newspapers, in particular, the New York Times, were delighted with Carmona as was the Bush administration. In August, the head of the opposition-led National Assembly publicly lamented the fall of Carmona’s dictatorship.

In the years following Carmon’s fall, the opposition’s near total dominance of the media was indeed “disrupted,” but it takes a coup-endorsing media outside Venezuela to label that an “assault on the press.” Here is some more discussion of errors and misleading remarks in Finnegan’s article.

Speaking of coup-endorsing media, the Wall Street Journal published an article on November 20 by Anatoly Kurmanaev that ran with the headline “Venezuela’s Nemesis Is a Hardware Salesman at a Home Depot in Alabama.” It invites readers to chuckle at the fact that an elderly Alabama resident, Gustavo Díaz, supposedly runs the DolarToday website. Accurate or not (it is the WSJ after all) in the middle of the article Kurmanaev reports the following as fact:

“Mr. Díaz is a U.S.-trained retired colonel, and he indeed tried to overthrow Mr. Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez, by participating in a short-lived coup in 2002. Mr. Díaz, who had been deputy security chief to the businessman who briefly took power in the ill-fated overthrow, said his conspiring days are over.

"Now, he said, he is fighting for economic freedom and for Venezuelans’ access to information in a country that makes financial and other data secret. Venezuela is undergoing a brutal recession that has made it hard for most of the country’s 30 million people to find enough food and medicine.

“It’s ironic that with DolarToday in Alabama, I do more damage to the government than I did as a military man in Venezuela,” said Mr. Díaz, a short, soft-spoken man with a gray mane."

Imagine a U.S. citizen participating in a briefly successful military coup against the U.S. government, getting asylum in Venezuela, and then publicly boasting that "I now do more damage to the U.S. government than I did before." Scores of people were murdered resisting the Carmona dictatorship before it fell. If the passage above is accurate, then Diaz should be held criminally responsible for his actions.

U.S. prosecutors have eagerly gone after Venezuelan officials — even the family members of officials — for alleged corruption, but apparently helping a right-wing dictatorship murderously cling to power is no big deal. Then again, to avoid rank hypocrisy and double standards, U.S. officials would also have to be prosecuted for numerous military coups and acts of aggression abroad. Fortunately, the deeply ingrained imperial assumptions of the WSJ reporters allow them to evade such troubling considerations.

What if you don’t like highbrow sources like the New Yorker, or if you don’t care to peek behind the WSJ’s paywall, or if you don’t care for any news media at all? Not to worry, U.S. sportscasters will make sure you don’t go without U.S. government propaganda about Venezuela.

Joe Emersberger was born in 1966 in Windsor, Ontario, Canada where he currently lives and works. He is an engineer and a member of the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) union.

http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Various-Flavors-of-Fake-News-about-Venezuela-20161124-0021.html

Videos at link.

The Mainstream Media Contortionists and their Fake News Circus
FEBRUARY 23, 2017 BY VANESSA BEELEY 0 COMMENTS

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In response to the establishment media’s contrived ‘fake news’ crisis designed to marginalise independent and alternative media sources of news and analysis, and due to our readers’ engagement on this important issue, 21WIRE is extending its #FakeNewsWeek awareness campaign for additional week, where each day our editorial team at 21st Century Wire will feature media critiques and analysis of mainstream corporate media coverage of current events – exposing the government and the mainstream media’s ‘fake news’ assembly line…

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Yves Engler
Dissident Voice

Can you trust any media outlet to tell the truth about foreign affairs? Or are they all part of some propaganda system? Perhaps the best we can do to understand what’s really happening in the world is read/listen/watch a variety of sources, but assume they are all biased in one way or another?
These questions came to mind after a recent Montréal event about Syria.
In a La Presse article, international affairs reporter Agnès Gruda essentially dismissed a presentation by a freelance journalist who has covered the war in Syria by writing: “for who does Eva Bartlett really work? During her conference, she confirmed that she wrote commentaries for Russia Today — a Russian propaganda organ.”
Gruda isn’t the only reporter to highlight Bartlett’s ties to RT when discussing her Syria work. A Hamilton Spectator story about her talks in that city noted, “Bartlett maintains a blog for the state-funded media outlet Russia Today” while Pulse reported that she contributed to the “Kremlin broadcaster Russia Today.” (Bartlett has published five articles about Syria for RT.)
Of course, the question of where journalists publish or who employs them and the interests of the owners/funders of said media does deserve attention. It is not unreasonable to be skeptical of a Russian media outlet’s reporting on Syria. While I’m not current with RT, it’s hard to imagine that a station set up by the Russian government wouldn’t be biased in favor of Moscow’s position in a conflict it is a major player in.
But, does Gruda describe herself as an employee of the billionaire Desmarais family that is heavily involved in Canadian and other countries’ politics? How does Gruda describe journalists who’ve written for Al Jazeera, which is owned by a Qatari monarchy that has backed armed opposition to Assad? Or how about the BBC, CBC and other media outlets owned by governments?
Does Gruda offer readers similar background on journalists who’ve worked on a National Film Board documentary? Created as part of the Canadian government’s World War II propaganda arsenal, the 1950 National Film Board Act calls for it to “promote the production and distribution of films in the national interest.”
Or, does she mention journalists’ ties when they have freelanced for Radio Canada International, a “Canadian government propaganda arm”? Initially focused on Eastern Bloc countries, beginning in 1945 RCI beamed radio abroad as part of “the psychological war against communism”, according to external minister Lester Pearson. Early on External Affairs was given a copy of the scripts used by commentators and it responded to criticism of Canada’s international policies. Into the 1990s RCI’s funding came directly from External Affairs.
Or what about the Canadian Press? The influential media institution has significant historic ties to official Canadian international policy. During World War I Ottawa helped establish the Canadian Press to increase pro-war coverage and strengthen national identity. A predecessor newswire disseminated Associated Press stories in Canada but the war spurred criticism of the US news agency, which did not cheerlead British/Canadian policy loud enough for some (Washington had yet to join the fighting).
“In effect, an arm of the British Foreign Ministry”, Reuters offered Canadian newspapers free wire copy during the war. But, the British press agency would only deliver the service to Ottawa. If the federal government “wanted to ensure that this pro-war imperial news service was distributed effectively across the country”, it had to subsidize a telegraph connection to the West Coast. To support CP the federal government put up $50,000 ($800,000 in today’s dollars) a year, which lasted for six years.
CP “cemented” itself as Canada’s national news service during World War II. “To accomplish this,” Gene Allen writes in a history of the organization, “CP cultivated unprecedentedly close relations with Canada’s military authorities — who had reasons of their own for wanting extensive coverage of the national war effort — and thereby moved some distance away from traditional notions of journalistic independence.” In an extreme example, CP recruited a Canadian Forces public relations officer who led reporters into battle zones. Bill Boss remained with the same unit but began reporting for the news service and would become one of Canada’s most famous war correspondents.
Nationalism remains an important media frame at the CP. “As a war correspondent in the 1990s”, former CP reporter Stephen Ward describes facing nationalist pressures. “I came under pressure to be patriotic when reporting on Canadian soldiers or peacekeepers in the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere [Iraq] … I should not embarrass Canada by reporting on mistakes in the field; I should not quote soldiers puzzled about their mission; I should do ‘feel-good’ pieces about soldiers watching hockey via satellite in warring Bosnia.”
Most Canadian media face similar pressures in their international coverage, as I detail in A Propaganda System: How Canada’s Government, Corporations, Media and Academia Sell War and Exploitation.
Certainly Russia’s foreign affairs machinery isn’t the only one that shapes international coverage. Highlighting Russia’s “propaganda system” to a Canadian audience without mentioning the one at home indicates either a journalist’s ignorance or that she is part of it.

End of Article

ADDENDUM BY EVA BARTLETT
“One note, while Yves’ points re RT are indeed valid, when it comes to submitting an opinion piece to RT, the opinions which I’ve submitted are mine, and I have not been censored nor directed by RT (and in fact, no corporate newspaper would publish what I wrote–not without heavy editing and censorship and changing of my chosen lexicon. Agnes Gruda did this to a journalist of La Presse, Khan Jooneed, when he wrote an honest article about the US invasion of Iraq, from where he was on the ground. Gruda, then his editor, chopped it down, ‘massacred’ it, as he told me in Montreal).
The disclaimer at the bottom of each op-edge also makes clear that contributions represent the writer, not RT: “The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.”
Following is an excerpt from a blog post on the subject:
“Since April 2013, I have contributed a total of 8 opinion pieces to RT’s Op-Edge section (3 of which were from or on Gaza, Occupied Palestine), an RT section which contains writings from over 70 authors.
8 articles in a period of nearly 4 years, that’s not exactly “active” writing dedicated to RT. Take a look at some of the other authors who are indeed very active. In fact, to the claims that any of my writing is opportunism, wouldn’t one expect me to thus direct most of my articles to RT and get paid something (nothing compared to BBC, NYTimes or other fake news journalists), rather than instead directing my articles to a variety of lesser or not at all paying sources? I have no qualms about my scant contribution of opinion pieces to RT, but to paint me as ‘working’ for RT is a fact-checking error, one which I believe to be intentional.
Further, Dr. Helen Caldicott and William Engdahl also contribute to RT Op-Edge. Will Channel 4 and other smear sites now claim they are working for Russia?
Thus, I am not ’employed by’ RT, I contribute sporadically to RT, as well as more regularly to a host of independent media (21st Century Wire, SOTT.net, MintPressNews, Dissident Voice, and formerly: Al Akhbar English, American Herald Tribune, Zero Anthropology, and others).
If not already glaringly clear, the intention of such ‘fact-check’ pieces is solely to discredit myself and others like me. And even though I strongly disagree with the lexicon of ‘civil war’ and ‘rebels’ frequently used in RT reports and commentaries, RT has been one of the few English-language media outlets to consistently have journalists on the ground, risking their lives to report the realities MSM would not report. I would encourage people to follow RT’s reports on Syria.”

http://21stcenturywire.com/2017/02/23/the-mainstream-media-contortionists-and-their-fake-news-circus/